Sharjah Architecture Triennial 2023 celebrates the ‘beauty of impermanence’

The Sharjah Architecture Triennial 2023 has launched with the global UAE festival opening its doors to the public over the weekend. Its theme, ‘The Beauty of Impermanence: An Architecture of Adaptability', has been set by its curator, Lagos-based architect Tosin Oshinowo of Oshinowo Studio (formerly cmDesign Atelier), who has pulled out all the stops to create a true global showcase for the festival's second edition. Exhibits are set to 'explore how we can create meaningful spaces that speak to their local environments and will highlight the contextual architects that are currently doing so', she told us during an interview earlier this year. 

Sharjah Architecture Triennial 2023: what to expect

Launching with a three-day celebration programme comprising talks, tours, screenings, workshops, and performances, the Sharjah Architecture Triennial 2023 puts the spotlight on the Global South, and architects' solutions for the territory's conditions of scarcity. Hoor Al Qasimi, president and director of Sharjah Art Foundation, highlighted at the opening the importance of this platform, which is 'rare in this part of the world, and is free and accessible to all'.

Oshinowo's curation is sharp but also broad, with carefully selected displays, as she investigates her theme from different angles. Her focus? Sustainability in the broader sense, which encompasses notions of community and who architecture and this event is addressed to ('everyone, in different ways', is her answer), as well as ideas around modernity and prosperity. 'The cornucopian model is unsustainable,' she said at the event's official opening ceremony. 'It is beyond an apology or acknowledgment of wrong. It's about planning together a constructive plan for the future. And it's not about going back. It's about looking back to go forward.'

A wide range of acclaimed participants (spanning exhibitors and participants in a rich events programme) include Lesley Lokko (curator of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023, architect and founder of the African Futures Institute in Accra), Rahul Mehrotra (Founder of RMA Architects and Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design), Cave_bureau, DAAR – Sandi Hilal & Alessandro Petti (who won the Golden Lion at the recent Venice Architecture Biennale 2023), Hive Earth, and Olorunfemi Adewuyi, architectural associate at Studio Contra – among many more.  

Highlights from the Sharjah Architecture Triennial 2023 exhibitions

A total of 29 contributions feature within the Sharjah Architecture Triennial 2023's main show, which is spread across five main sites – Al Qasimiyah School, the old Al Jubail vegetable market, the old slaughterhouse, Industrial Area 5, the Sharjah Mall, and Al Madam (a ghost village in the desert, about an hour's drive from the city centre). 

The venues themselves offer a fitting backdrop to their displays, as Oshinowo carefully planned what goes where and worked with exhibitors to find the best home for their design. Limbo Accra's SUPER LIMBO, for instance, which examines the future and potential of abandoned construction sites, could not be in a better venue than the paused-half-way-through-construction Sharjah Mall. 

Meanwhile, exhibition designers Space Caviar oversaw the way everything comes together from their own perspective, working with found objects and raw construction materials to craft an appropriate setting for each exhibit to sing on its own.

At the Al Qasimiyah School, where the largest proportion of participations can be found, highlights include a powerful (conceptually but also olfactorily, due to its production method in cardboard papier-mâché) piece by Sandra Poulson on dust in Luanda, and how it defined urban borders and became an 'accidental gift'; an open-air 'corridor' by Vinu Daniel and Wallmakers created in desert sand and some of the (terrifying amount of) used tyres discarded across the globe every three minutes; a peaceful and cool pavilion made of earth by architect Sumaya Dabbagh; Nifemi Marcus-Bello's exploration in design as an open-source good, using the example of Lagos' 'Meruwa' carts for supplying water; and Natura Futura's floating housing structures in Ecuador. 

The old vegetable market's linear sequence of displays works very well, offering a good pace through pieces such as Olalekan Jayifous' signature speculative retrofuturist extravaganza, which on this occasion touches upon Sharjah's and the UAE's oil boom and evolution in the 20th century; Ruína Architecture's explorations in the reuse of demolition waste; and Thomas Egoumenides’ comment on authenticity, through his installation 'The Ship of Theseus'.

It culminates at the nearby abandoned slaughterhouse, which has been added to the triennial venues this year for the first time and is occupied by two of the event’s strongest installations. One is Cave_bureau's newest edition of its 'Anthropocene Museum' project, which places animals as protagonists and examines our attitudes to thoughtless consumption and growth through bold visuals, physical interventions to the building fabric, and sounds. The second piece is Adrian Pepe's intensely site-specific and rather uncanny installation made from the gathered pelts of the fat-tailed Awassi sheep, which are a by-product of the slaughtering process.

Alongside Limbo Accra's presence at Sharjah Mall, two more installations are located off the main sites, but they are truly worth the visit. Papa Omotayo (behind Yinka Shonibare's Ecology Green Farm in Nigeria) and Eve Nnaji of MOE+AA/ADD-apt have created a celebration of the fragile nature and birds found in the heart of one of Sharjah's several industrial areas. 

Made of recycled materials, it is a publically accessible pavilion, where one can wander in and contemplate notions of 'tending, caring and observing'.

The third off-site piece, and the furthest away, but one that must not be missed, is DAAR's 'Concrete Tent', set in Al Madam Village, near the borders with Oman and about an hour's drive from Sharjah centre. 

The urban context, built in the 1970s but since abandoned, feels a fitting, emotive setting for DAAR's comment around the permanence of temporary conditions, and becomes a powerful place for mourning. Visitors are invited into the tent, made from a repurposed solid wood frame and concrete-like appliqué, to reflect on migrant populations, their living conditions across the world, and the tragic death of children in the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine.

This is a triennial that examines its themes through carefully selected installations that read as a well-rounded whole. Materials, human habits, challenging ideas, communities, the past, the present and imagined futures are all here, bringing together a thought-provoking result. 

'This Triennial is a labour of love and opportunity for discovery,' said Oshinowo. 'It will provide people with an opportunity to think differently about spaces, practices, and designs across the Global South. As an architect coming from practice, it is very important to me that the triennial is inclusive. Visitors will not need to have prior knowledge to engage with the ideas on display. Whether you have a strong understanding of design or not, you should be able to take something away from the triennial.'

Sharjah Architecture Triennial 2023, 'The Beauty of Impermanence: An Architecture of Adaptability' runs 11 November 2023 – 10 March 2024 in the UAE

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